Get the Books, Brooks

Sure, every bit of software on your computer now has online help. Everything you need to know about your software is right there somewhere, just hit the help key, click on the question mark, hit F1, and everything you might need to know is suddenly there on the screen, right?Ho, ho, ho, says the Prince. What a joke online help is!

Did you know that some careful studies show that comprehension drops about twenty-five percent when people read information from the screen, compared to when they read from a book?

Also, those help pages which pop up with a click are often garbage. The industry, dumb as usual, normally puts its worst writers and worst brains to work writing the manual.

The online help, the most important information in your professional life, is usually written by duds. 'Darn, this fool can't program worth a damn, and besides he falls asleep in the team meetings, so send him over to documentation... they're always short of help.'

So the Prince's thirty-first tip for increased productivity is logical and crucial: beg, borrow, or steal, but get all the books you need.

Only once in the Prince's long and illustrious programming career did he have enough books to do his job correctly.

When he got promoted to IBM's think tank FSC, way back when, his manager showed him to his new desk in a corner, and the Prince found himself surrounded by bookcases: one to his left, one to his right, and one behind him, every one chock full of IBM manuals, every manual on every language on the machine, and on the operating system, and even concepts and facilities and debugging. For the first (and last) time in his professional life, he had all the information he needed to do his job correctly.

Look around you. Where are the bookcases? Where are the books on Windows? Where are the tomes on your compilers, and on your programming languages? Last time the Prince checked, most programmers needed or used about eight languages. Are there at least eight books on your desk, one for each language?

Odds are about a thousand to one you don't have the books you really need to do your job efficiently.

And people still wonder why programmer productivity industry-wide is so poor.

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An industry vet shares techniques for increasing output and efficiency, including how to get more done every day while making ...
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An industry vet shares techniques for increasing output and efficiency, including how to get more done every day while making fewer errors, how to write more and better code which needs less maintenance, and how to use hardware and software to enhance productivity.
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